Nightmare
by glitterburn
Summary: Van Helsing/Carl. Sequel to 'Words Crossed'. Carl helps Gabriel to make sense of his memories.


**Nightmare**

"What's the first thing you remember?"

I should have known better than to ask that. Silence was my only reply: I might as well have been talking to a wall. There are many walls in the Vatican, and I could think of several that would be more informative at face value than the man who was slouched in the chair opposite me.

I leaned forwards. Despite what Cardinal Jinette said, I had other things that required my attention. Inventions may dwell in another plane of existence, but they will never become reality unless we search for them; and while I was as interested as the next man in our latest arrival, I would rather not be required to be interested.

"Van Helsing!"

He raised an eyebrow. "I'm thinking."

"Yes. Well, while you're having a nice think, then perhaps I could just slip away and finish off my latest experiment…"

I was almost out of the door when his laconic drawl reached me: "I thought I _was_ your latest experiment."

"Really, there's no need for sarcasm," I said, putting my back to the wall but leaving the door ajar in case I could yet escape back to the laboratory. "I'm just trying to be helpful. I told you I could not fix minds. I believe there is a Dr Breuer in Austria who might be better placed to help you."

Van Helsing shifted position in the chair to sit sideways; both legs hooked over one armrest. He was so tall that the tips of his boots nearly touched the floor. I worried for the chair. It was fifteenth century, made of dark stained oak and carved with roses. I had never treated it so familiarly, and it pained me that he thought so little of its history.

"Cardinal Jinette won't let me out of here for that kind of treatment," he said, wagging one foot up and down and then grinning as I followed the motion with my gaze. "I get the impression that he'd prefer this to be kept a secret."

"What, precisely?"

He shrugged. "Me, I suppose. I must be pretty special, huh?"

"I don't think so," I sniffed, but I came back into the room anyway. We were in a solar, tucked away in a corner of the Vatican at least four spiral staircases distant from my laboratory. It was a small room, made smaller by the presence of such a large man. The fire in the grate popped and spluttered, and gave off an infernal stink of green wood.

I went to open the shutters, and then sighed in irritation. The lead was peeling away from the quarries in the narrow window, and so a draught leaked around the room. I turned over the problem in my mind for a moment, and then, with a pleasing flash of inspiration, the answer came to me: two sets of glazing, with a vacuum in the middle to prevent condensation from forming.

"That's perfect!" I said aloud, forgetting that van Helsing could not have any possible notion of what had just passed through my head.

"What is?" he asked, bemused; and as I turned to tell him, he said hurriedly, "No: forget it. I don't want to know. One of your crazy inventions, I suppose."

"My inventions help people," I said, stung.

"Then help me."

He sounded as frustrated as I felt, and so I shuffled back to the chair closest to the fire and began to warm my toes. "Very well. Let's start again. What do you remember?"

He thought again. Clearly it was hard work, for he looked fretful. Eventually he brushed back the hair from his forehead and said: "Pain. I remember pain."

I supposed I should have expected that. "First thing or last thing?" I prodded.

Van Helsing scowled. "Both. I can't recollect a time other than now that I didn't feel some sort of pain – physical, mental, spiritual…"

"Ah!" I jumped on the last word. "But you came here, yes? To the place that can heal spiritual pain. Perhaps you were a monk!"

He looked decidedly put out by the suggestion. "Does this look like a tonsure?" he asked, combing through his hair again.

"Well, no. But that doesn't mean anything," I said in reassurance. "My own hair is frequently described as chaotic and untidy, but I believe that that is because Cardinal Jinette is jealous, having little hair left himself."

Van Helsing made a gesture as if to rub his nose, but not before I glimpsed a smile. "I thought you religious weren't supposed to indulge in sinful thoughts. Are you insinuating that Jinette suffers from envy?"

"Pride, too," I added. "But it's all right. He's a cardinal. I think they get special dispensation for that sort of thing."

He gave up trying to hide the smile. "So we've established that I was not a monk. I think we can rule out any kind of religious life, given that I've been hired as an executioner of demons."

"Oh, no," I protested. "No, that's not right. I would have thought that being a religious was ideal for demon-hunting. God can be very handy in a tricky situation, or so I've heard."

"You think I was an exorcist?"

"Maybe. Or at least somebody who repossesses the damned."

The humour died from his face, and he looked away. "Saving souls. That's what your kind like doing, isn't it? Only it doesn't always work out quite as well as you'd hope."

I bristled at the implications. "We saved _you_. The cardinal said you were a bleeding lump crawling up the steps -"

"I think you'll find that he said 'bloody lump'. There is a difference, if only in terms of affection." He smiled again, but it looked bitter. "You only saved my body. I have no idea what has become of my soul – if I ever had one in the first instance."

"All things have a soul," I said, mildly shocked by his blasphemy. "How can you doubt it? Even the pagan philosophers agreed on that principle."

"Not all of them," he said.

I leaned forwards and put my chin in my hands. "Granted, the Presocratics -"

"Those morons! No, no: they had no time for the soul, it was all atoms to them." Van Helsing clicked his fingers, trying to remember. "Epicurus! Didn't he put forward the idea of atoms?"

"Amongst others." I sounded smug. "So you know your pagan philosophy. That's interesting."

He looked wary. "It's irrelevant."

"It means that you at least remember _something_." I uncurled from my position and sat back. "Even if you read Plato a week before you arrived here, it's a link with your other life."

He swung his legs and stared at the far wall, his expression shuttered. "I have the feeling that I didn't read all that much back then."

I sighed. "Then perhaps somebody told you about it."

"Boring conversation that would be."

I stood up and walked around into his line of vision, and then folded my arms across my chest and glared at him. "Van Helsing, you are not helping matters. You know what I think? I think you don't want to know who you were before. It's easier to reinvent yourself. But you can't, you know. Once something has been created, it cannot be uncreated. Destroyed, yes; improved upon, yes: but not uncreated. Never. So whatever and whoever you were before this, you can't escape it."

He stared at me, a touch of astonishment in his gaze. "If I've forgotten it, then I can reinvent it."

"Not necessarily. You might forget the tune, but you will still be able to sing."

He gave a crack of laughter. "You're funny."

"No, I'm not. At least, not deliberately. And you are not going to change the subject, either." I came closer and wagged a finger at him in an attempt to be stern. His smirk told me more clearly than words that I had, of course, failed miserably in this task.

"Jinette seems to think that my amnesia is punishment for my sins," he said as I settled myself back on the chair again.

"He's a cardinal. He would think that," I replied, fussing with my habit.

"I thought you monks were supposed to agree on questions of doctrine."

I sighed loudly. He really was the most irritating man. "I'm a friar. We're not quite so dogmatic in our approaches."

Van Helsing grinned. "Really? Explain the Dominicans, then."

I opened my mouth to retort, and then wondered if he was joking. He had a very strange sense of humour that I, for one, didn't fully understand. Cardinal Jinette called it gallows humour, as if hanging were something comedic. I didn't think it was, but then I have never seen a man hanged. In any case, I decided to give van Helsing the benefit of the doubt, and said cautiously, "Some of my best friends are Dominicans."

He chuckled. "You really are very funny, Carl."

"I don't mean to be." My shoulders sagged. "And – damn it! – you changed the subject. I didn't want you to do that."

"I'm sorry," he said, although he sounded far from it. "I don't remember having laughed much, before. So you must forgive me for finding humour where I can."

I huffed slightly, and tried another tack: "You said you have nightmares. Do you remember their substance at all?"

"Yes." Van Helsing shuddered, just the once and quickly, but I saw it.

"And what do they tell you? For there are those who believe that dreams are trapped memories. Artemidorus, for example, wrote that the events of the day are processed in the sleeping mind. So it could be that what you dream reflects not what you did yesterday or the day before, but last year, or a decade ago…"

He was silent for a while, and then he said, "My nightmares are my business."

"And you are the Vatican's business, and the Vatican is my business: so tell me," I said. "Honestly, van Helsing: you wanted me to help you and now, again, you deliberately put up a wall between us. How I'm supposed to work with you is anybody's guess."

"Carl…" He stopped, and tried again: "Have you never had bad dreams?"

"No," I said. "Well, perhaps. Maybe once or twice. I had some last year, but that was after I'd managed to set fire to the papal throne. It was entirely accidental, but for some reason nobody believed me. I was confined to my cell for several weeks after that. I had bad dreams then."

He seemed not hear me. Instead he continued: "It's not that I don't want to tell you. It's just that… perhaps you won't believe me. Or you will seek to find the answer from somewhere else, and not accept that it is a memory."

I cocked my head to one side, interested. "Artemidorus also said that we often dream in allegory or metaphor," I told him.

"And what if something seems like an allegory, but is in fact reality?"

"I don't know. You must give me an example before I can decide."

Again he sank into silence, as if debating whether or not to trust me. I was about to tell him that everyone should feel able to trust a friar when he started to speak, and his voice was so quiet that I had to draw my chair closer in order to hear him.

"This is one of the dreams," he began. "Not so much a nightmare, but it wakes me from the deepest sleep and leaves me shaking. I dream that I stand in a church, but not one such as here: it is plainer, cruder: but immense. There is darkness outside, a smothering, heated darkness; and there's dust in the air. Sometimes I cannot breathe."

I watched his expression. The lines around his mouth had tightened as he spoke, and for a moment I wanted to reach out and touch him, just in reassurance.

"Into this church there comes a creature," he continued. "It has wings – three pairs of tawny wings all covered in staring eyes that never blink and never sleep; and it carries in one hand a wheel of fire that turns ceaselessly, yet never burns. In the other hand, this creature holds a pair of tongs – wields them, in fact, as if they were a weapon. And its face is blinding, but strangely I can see its expression; and it looks at me with sadness and pity."

I gaped at him in astonishment, and then, when he shook himself out of the spell of remembrance and demanded "What?" I hastened to explain myself.

"You say this is recollection, and not an allegory?" I asked.

He nodded, warily.

"What you described…" I paused, uncertain as to whether I should go on or if I should run to tell Cardinal Jinette, and then I continued: "What you just described is a creature few men have seen."

"Maybe I killed it," he said. "It sounds monstrous."

"No!" I waved my hands. "No, you cannot kill this creature. It doesn't exist. Well, it does, but it doesn't. It is made of light -"

"Not atoms?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow.

"It is made of light," I repeated, and glared at him. "And it is good, not evil. Isaiah and Elijah saw a similar creature, and it burned their lips with fiery coals held in the tongs so as to purify their words. And the wheel of fire is from Ezekiel: it is holy fire, divine judgement, an act of God."

Van Helsing refused to meet my gaze. "Perhaps I was wrong about the nature of the dream. It must surely be allegory, as you said."

"No." I shook my head. "You saw a seraph. It was a vision. Isaiah, Elijah, Ezekiel – they were all great prophets, chosen men of God, and -"

"I am not Chosen!" he snapped, so viciously and suddenly that I started back in my chair. It wobbled on the flagstones and disturbed the fire: a log tumbled free from the grate with a loud pop, showering sparks over the hearth. We both jumped, and stared down at the blackened wood that still glowed with heat.

"I think you are," I said at last.

He looked at me bleakly. "Then my nightmare has just begun."

**end**


End file.
